The glorious myth of "female Viagra"

This much we know for sure: You do not touch the third rail. You do not betray your closest friends. You do not eat the fuzzy part of the cheese.

You do not rise up from the watery depths too rapidly, lest you go quickly insane. You do not drink five cups of coffee and three shots of absinthe and then attempt delicate brain surgery, blindfolded. You do not drill for oil a mile down in the pristine seas and have no reliable backup systems should something go horribly, horribly wrong. You do not mock Mother Nature.

But above all else, for absolute certain, one thing you really, really do not do: You do not mess around with the female sexual response.

I'm wondering if this will be the one to do it. I'm wondering if the current flurry of activity around the long-rumored, hotly debated, coolly mistrusted, still nonexistent "female Viagra," that hugely elusive wonderdrug currently being chased down by a whole slew of eager, cash-hungry major pharmcos, will be the one to change everything. And not necessarily for the better.

Have you heard? About the magic, billion-dollar pill that's to be aimed at the roughly 40 percent (!) of American women who report a complete lack of interest in sex, who have low or nonexistent libidos, women for whom even moderate arousal is akin to finding a happy gay Mormon in Utah?

Is this the one? Will this be the wild drug chase that finally cracks us wide open, make us see the light, the folly, the futility of trying to unwind the deeper and juicier mysteries of existence? Let us ponder.

We're getting closer. The FDA just rejected the second major attempt at a female libido enhancer, a drug called flibanserin, from German titan Boehringer Ingelheim. Seems the FDA was unimpressed by the drug's overall effectiveness, despite BI's claims that flibanserin's power lies not in its ability to stimulate immediate sexual arousal, but rather in how it serves as a more general improver of overall sensual awareness. Or something.

No matter. This fine attempt means it won't be long until more drugs come down the pike, aiming to capture that elusive gold ring called "female sex drive." I'm actually sort of looking forward to the efforts; something really interesting is bound to emerge, something weird and wonderful, revealing and troubling, all at once.

It's a strange and fascinating game, this hunt. On the one hand, it's widely believed that female libido issues are at least partially clinical, medical, chemical, a genuinely treatable condition, something a synthetic drug can assist in at least partially rekindling. Hell, we have drugs that do everything from tricking your heartbeat to those that help you stop screaming in the night. Why not this?

On the other hand... well, the other hand is where it gets really interesting.

Here's the thing: Everyone knows male Viagra is all about simple mechanics, a brilliant plumbing fix, and nothing more. The miraculous blue pill actually does zilch for male sex drive, nothing to "turn you on," nothing to make sex any hotter or kinkier or orgasmically mindblowing, nothing to help generate a mad lust to be gang-licked by 10,000 nubile callipygian wood nymphs while driving a Bugatti Veyron at 250 mph straight into the sun. For men, that sort of physical lust is automatic, a priori, woven in to our very bones.

The female version is an entirely different divine pink mystery-soaked wildebeest altogether.

The female sexual response is gorgeously, notoriously, infuriatingly hardwired into more than a few unfathomable cosmic wavelengths, along with a whole army of wobbly expectations, cultural proscriptions, maternal drives, menopausal shifts, depressions, ecstasies, bored housewiferies, psychological contradictions -- not to mention nearly 2,000 years of male-dominated culture not having a f--ing clue what the clitoris is actually for, combined with a near total medical ignorance (until recently) of intricate female plumbing.

In short, female sexuality is the same as it's ever been: a divine, inscrutable kaleidoscope wrapped in a mystery shaped like a yonic enigma. Parsing it in any reliable way has been one of humanity's greatest challenges, joys, follies, wine-soaked laughter-filled experiments.

My humble male prediction: It will continue to be this way for... well, just about forever. Like poetry, art, the Great Pyramids and avocadoes, it is simply not meant to be unraveled. Put another way, if we ever do fully unravel it, it means the time-space continuum has come undone, consciousness has finally shifted, and we are ready for the next leap. Understand female sexuality, you understand God. Or at least, you understand how She dances.

Do not misunderstand: I'm not de facto against the pharmcos attempting this bizarre feat of effrontery, despite the inherent insult of corporations thinking they can delineate and define the workings of the female sex. Hell, the DSM-IV has been doing it for years. So has the church. Ditto modern medicine. It's just our nature. Complaining that drug makers are inventing ailments to make a profit is like bitching about how alligators in Florida keep eating all the little fluffy doggies on the shore. This is just what they do.

In fact, I wish them luck. If nothing else, there will be many fascinating theories, findings, test methods, focus groups. Who knows? One of these corporations may stumble on a bit of truly magnificent, unexpected wisdom about the female wonderdazzle that makes us rethink the entire human sexual experiment altogether.

But know this: There is no way in hell well get anywhere near to figuring it all out. No pill can ever touch the complexity. The best we can do is examine and isolate a few trouble spots, find a few fixes for the most distressed and needful among us, hope for the best.

It's a bit like NASA poking at the dangerous magnificence of black holes, those swirling deep space phenomena that entice and enthrall us almost as much as they scare us silly. Sure, we can get reasonably close, we can take astounding photos, we can make all sorts of educated guesses as to what might be happening in there. We can even send in a few probes, feelers, satellites, take some measurements and gather a few samples to send back to the lab.

But holy hell on a tip of a vibrator, you don't actually go in there. That's where worlds collide, universes expand, meanings come undone, gods laugh, demons play poker with angels, and fire turns into spun glass in the shape of a Sylvia Plath poem. You think you got a pill for that? The hell you do.

Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate, and is frequently cross-posted to Huffington Post. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list, click here and remove three more.